


cringe

by brujeria



Series: you are the cold inescapable proof [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Depression, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, Loki (Marvel) Has Issues, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other, Past Relationship(s), Recreational Drug Use, Social Commentary, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 15:23:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20641382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brujeria/pseuds/brujeria
Summary: Loki gets clean (sort of) on the thirtieth day of the fifth month of the twenty fifth year that the Earth has traveled around the sun since Loki suffered the unfortunate inconvenience of being born.The sequel to Florida Kilos that nobody (absolutely nobody) asked for.





	cringe

**Author's Note:**

> this work was heavily influenced by matt maeson's album 'bank on the funeral'. i highly suggest giving it a listen, either while reading this or at another point in time.

I.

“maybe life was just a bet that i lost to drugs and cigarettes.”  
⃫ matt maeson – i just don’t care that much

Loki gets clean (sort of) on the thirtieth day of the fifth month of the twenty fifth year that the Earth has traveled around the sun since Loki suffered the unfortunate inconvenience of being born.

×××

Loki gets sober after Thor leaves a voicemail of himself crying and begging Loki to answer _someone_ (any one of the few people that Loki has left_)_ after a six day bender where he spent most of his time either hiding in his bedroom or at Thanos’s apartment. When Loki comes home it’s to a pitch black flat. Ares doesn’t come to greet him, and Loki ponders if cats can get mad at their owners. But as Loki flips on the light switch in the kitchen he takes stock of the full bowls of water and food on the kitchen floor and – for a very, _very_ brief moment – he feels incredibly guilty. But that moment passes rather quickly as he knows that Thor has been there.

The voicemail that Thor had left got under Loki’s skin.

_“Loki, you’ve got to answer someone. Please just answer. Please just let me know that you’re okay,” Thor says._ The _“that you’re alive” _is unspoken but hangs heavy in the air. There’s a long pause and at first Loki thinks that Thor just forgot to hang up the phone. But then he hears Thor’s voice breaking on the other line. _“I can’t keep doing this, little brother. I just can’t. I can’t keep living with your damage.”_ And Loki hears a part of Thor break away, a part of Thor that he knows somewhere deep down will never come back. There’s another long pause, and then Thor says quietly, _“Please call me back.”_

Loki listens to the message a full day after it was left, and when he gets it he wants to hurl his phone at the wall. He thinks about Thor and Natasha and Tony, _oh gods Tony_. He thinks about all the wreckage he’s caused in the lives of the people he’s loved, and something in him seems to change.

He digs deep into his pocket to pull out the cylindrical waterproof pill container that’s full of oxycodone and hydromorphone, and he goes into the kitchen and turns on the sink and he pours the little white and pink pills down the drain.

He calls Thor back, and he can hear the relief in Thor’s voice as he answers the phone.

Thor is the only person that Loki tells about his revelation to quit doing pills (he doesn’t want anyone else to get their hopes up). And when Thor finds out Loki thinks Thor might cry with happiness and relief, and for what is hopefully the last time he is reminded of just how huge of a fuck up he has been.

The withdrawals are a bitch – there’s no other way to put it. The first three days are the worst. The majority of those first three days Loki spends sweating and shaking and puking and crying. He’s never felt more alone in his life and he can barely move from the couch. On the second day he is able to text Thanos and ask him to find something – _anything – _that will help with the withdrawals, but Thanos doesn’t get back to him until the next day.

Loki yells for Thanos to come into the unlocked apartment when he hears him knock somewhere around the early evening (or is it late morning?) of the third day. Thanos enters and smirks when he sees the state Loki is in, not out of pure cruelty, but because he had warned Loki early on about what withdrawal would be like before Thanos started selling to him.

Obviously, Loki didn’t take the speech to heart since he’s staring up at Thanos through the gap of a weighted blanket that’s cocooned around his head and draping over his shoulders with a trash can next to him and seven empty Gatorade bottles around him on the floor.

Obviously, Loki had experience with opioids given that he was being handed tramadol and hydrocodone and oxycodone since the accident.

Obviously, Loki didn’t know how deep of shit he was about to get himself into when Thanos introduced him to hydromorphone and fentanyl. The fentanyl patches were always Loki’s favorite, but those were hard to come by. On the rare occasion that Thanos could get fentanyl Loki would buy every single one he had. Loki liked to cut the patches into strips, stick one on his back or upper arm, and then blissfully sink into his bed or the couch, or – only _sometimes_ – the floor. The numbness was heaven, and Loki loved that the strips of patches lasted several days and that he could be blissfully high for that long of a period of time. But then there was the hydromorphone – _dear_ _gods_ the _dilaudid_.

Obviously, when Thanos told Loki to crush and snort the little triangular pills he was skeptical. The first few pills that he snorted didn’t do a thing, but just as he had finished attempting to wait for the third one to kick in and had his phone in his hand with his thumb over Thanos’ contact info, the third pill hit him in a wave of euphoria. He was euphoric and numb and _happy _– for the first time in what felt like forever he felt _genuinely happy_. He had more energy than he remembered having as a nine year-old. His limbs were numb and heavy and everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. But he had this urge to move – to do _something_. His creativity felt like it was at a peak; Loki would dance or write or paint whenever on dilaudid. It was not a drug to _do_ _nothing_ on. It was a _something_ drug. It was a drug that made him happy and hopeful and creative and like _himself_ again. It was everything Loki could have ever asked for in a drug, and thus, he fell in love.

What they don’t tell you, however, is that the euphoria isn’t real – it’s manufactured dopamine. It’s pharmaceutically induced bliss.

Ares approaches Thanos as he sits on the loveseat, rubbing against his legs. Thanos allows a hand to fall down and Ares rubs his face against his loosely curled fingers. Thanos unzips his book bag and pulls out several Ziploc baggies, looking for the one that he intends on selling to Loki. And as Thanos does this Loki spies a bag of little white triangular pills, and, _oh_, how he craves that dilaudid high _just_. _one_. _more_. _time_. Eventually, after what seems like forever but in reality is really only about a minute, Thanos finds the baggie that he’s been looking for. It’s full of several white tear apart packages.

“This,” Thanos says, “is suboxone. It’s used to treat opioid withdrawals. It’ll reduce the urges and it helps prevent the withdrawal symptoms.” Thanos has seven strips, which he tells Loki is a week’s supply. Each strip is forty dollars, and Loki is desperate for anything to make him feel better and to make this stop, so he sheds his blanket cocoon and stumbles to the lock box that’s hidden under a pile of clothes in his bedroom – _among other things_ – and haphazardly counts out two hundred and eighty dollars. Loki hands the money over to Thanos, and in return Thanos hands over the bag filled with the suboxone strips.

Loki opens one of the packages that holds one of the suboxone strips, pulls the strip out, pinches it between the tips of his fingers, and looks it over.

“So how the fuck am I supposed to use this?” he asks, glancing up at Thanos skeptically and turning the package that the strip came in over in his fingers.

“Put it under your tongue and let it dissolve. That’s basically it.”

Loki sticks the strip under his tongue and does as Thanos said. Thanos talks at Loki about things Loki doesn’t care about, and then leaves shortly after the strip has dissolved under Loki’s tongue. Loki lays down on the couch, cocoons up in his blanket again, and pulls up a playlist on his phone.

And then, for the first time in almost three days, Loki sleeps. It’s a deep, hard sleep that lasts almost as long as the first time he ever took an opioid – a whole 14 hours. And when Loki wakes up he feels nothing but gratitude, because they don’t tell you about the insomnia, the worst depression Loki had ever felt, the crippling loneliness, the feverish and paralyzing craving dreams that would occur when Loki actually could manage to fall asleep for a couple hours.

So, Loki _sleeps_.

×××

Of course, Loki doesn’t get totally sober. He vows to quit opioids, but he still partakes in some of the other finer drugs – specifically lysergic acid diethylamide and psilocybin mushrooms. He’s finding a lightness he hasn’t felt since he was a child, and at this point Loki will take pretty much whatever he can get.

Loki takes acid for the third time on a warm Tuesday summer evening at Natasha’s apartment, where the windows are wide open and the summer air and heat creep inside. It’s just Loki and Thor and Natasha sitting on the floor of her apartment, two out of the trio just happen to be tripping on hallucinogens. Thor is one hundred percent sober; he’s just babysitting tonight.

Natasha is talking about something, and Loki is looking at her and trying to listen but the more he tries to look at her face the more it womp womp womps into swirling tracers of porcelain skin and red hair. Loki decides to focus his eyes on the carpet and tries to listen to what Natasha is saying, but as he stares at the carpet the dark blue fibers begin to spiral out and into the air. He touches the carpet and the sensation of the tough fibers against his fingers rush up through his arm and a warmth fills his entire body.

Loki sits there petting the carpet for quite a while. His eyes feel like they’re moving on their own and he finds himself staring at the wall for quite some time, staring at the prints and framed posters on the wall as they come to life. There is a euphoria in Loki that he’s never felt before, not even with pills.

Loki hears his name and feels a warm sensation run down his arm and through his hand. Thor had tapped his shoulder, but Loki is now stuck staring at his hand in silent awe as his fingers are growing outward until each finger is nearly two feet long. He moves his hand in front of his face, and his hand and extra-long fingers leave a trace of an image through the open air.

Thor shakes Loki, and Loki’s body melts into a wave. Before Loki registers what’s happening he’s lying on the floor with his head in Thor’s lap. Even though he can’t feel Thor’s skin – skin to skin contact; a magical feeling while on hallucinogens – it’s still a magical feeling. The soft fabric of Thor’s joggers feel better than sex after an argument.

———

Loki wakes up beside Natasha in her bed the next morning. It’s nothing unusual for the two of them; during a sleepover who in their right mind makes their friend sleep on the floor or couch, especially when there is a king sized bed in the room?

It takes several minutes for Loki to realize he’s conscious again, but when he does he feels… fine. There is no hangover, no shitty feelings, no vomiting, no shakiness, no constant switching of feeling either extremely hot or extremely cold. His body doesn’t ache, his head feels clear, and there’s no debilitating depression.

Once he is awake enough to move he slides silently out of the bed and slips through the open bedroom door, where he finds Thor making himself some breakfast a la bacon, scrambled eggs, and homemade waffles. Thor looks up when he hears Loki’s footsteps transfer from the carpet to the hardwood floor, and he grins.

“Breakfast?” Thor offers as Loki runs his fingers through his tangled hair and glances around the kitchen for signs of disaster. The end of the night is a little foggy for Loki, and that’s probably because they started drinking when the spiraling of the walls and art and carpet and faces and hands started to slow down. Despite not feeling like total shit, Loki still has a nagging sense of anxiety over the fact that his memory from the last hour before he fell asleep is a little blurry right now. He finds no such remnants of disaster, so he nods to Thor who hands him a plate.

“You woke up just in time. Waffles just finished. I swear you have some internal food alarm. Even when mom would cook us breakfast when we were kids, you’d sleep in until the food was completely done,” Thor says, chuckling. Food still isn’t Loki’s best friend, but Thor has made the bacon and eggs exactly how Loki likes them – fatty and covered in maple syrup (an absolute guilty pleasure, to say the least) – and even threw in _homemade waffles_. They both make plates and then venture to the living room.

“Thor, I gotta ask you somethin’,”Loki says between bites of egg.

Thor glances up from the television that’s playing a music video countdown from the 90s, “What?”

Loki thinks for a minute, trying to arrange the words he wants to say into a coherent sentence that Thor will understand. “Did I… I didn’t.. I didn’t do anything stupid last night, right?”

Thor shakes his head, grinning down at his plate like he’s keeping a secret.

“Unless you call laying in my lap and playing with my beard until you fell asleep stupid, then no, you didn’t.”

Hallucinogens, Loki decides, are a fabulous way of making him lose his mind while freeing his soul.

II.

Loki relapses on the eighteenth day of the sixth month of the twenty fifth year that the Earth has traveled around the sun since Loki suffered the unfortunate inconvenience of being born.

×××

Loki is at a bar he’s never been to at 1:46am with Thor because _apparently_ Loki needs to get _out_ more – even though it’s been a measly sixteen hours after he and Natasha had gone to the Pride festival. Loki’s cheekbones are sticky with leftover blue purple and pink glitter, he’s resorted to tying his hair, damp from sweat and water, in the unholiest messy bun anyone has ever done, and he has been drinking since 10:00am.

Needless to say, he’s pretty sloshed.

Thor is talking to Peter Quill too loudly, and Loki isn’t sure if it’s just because Thor is in general a rather loud and boisterous person or because the music in the bar is so loud that Loki can barely hear himself think. Thor is starting a business and he’s been networking over tax accountants and licensing procedures while Loki has sat in the darkened corner of the dimly lit bar contemplating his life thus far and donning sunglasses because he’s already hungover and he’s still drunk and the room is spinning. Somewhere in the distance he hears Thor’s voice, and he vaguely registers that Thor is saying his name. Loki’s head swivels maybe a little too quickly to the right and the room begins to spin even quicker and suddenly his eyes can’t focus on anything and a knot of nausea grows in his stomach.

It’s when the spinning dies and crawls away that Loki sees him in the distance, just right of Thor’s head.

It’s Tony Stark.

The nausea intensifies.

Tony’s in front of the bar surrounded by a large group of friends, some of whom Loki knows and recognizes and some that he doesn’t. They have their shot glasses raised high, genuine smiles on their faces and loud laughter falling from their mouths like a projectile vomited rainbow. Tony is talking to the group, but alas, with the loud music playing on the bar’s sound system and the fact that they are in a rather large bar Loki has no idea what is being said or what is going on. However, it’s rather obvious that there’s a celebration of some sorts going on across the room.

The two internal fighting possums inside Loki that control his anxiety start to tear each other apart the way the Mountain tore apart Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones. He hails the waitress as she’s walking by and orders two shots of Patron with lime and a sugar rim before he sinks even deeper into the corner, if that was even possible. His sunglasses slip down his nose as he stares at Tony and prays he doesn’t see Thor and Peter and himself from across the bar.

The waitress brings Loki’s shots to the table, and just as Loki is licking the sugar off the rim, sucking on the lime, and downing the shot he hears Thor’s voice again.

“Loki? Is something wrong?”

And Loki, he prays even harder that Thor doesn’t see Tony whatsoever, but his prayers must have fallen on deaf ears as Loki has noticed seems to happen rather often. But at the same time his eyes are glued to Tony’s every movement – an obvious tell even with Thor’s generous lack of attention to detail. Thor turns and stares for a few moments and by this point Loki is almost covering his face with his hands to try to hide even more, and he expects Thor to do something along the lines of yelling, “Tony Stark!” and waving from across the bar. (The man lacks subtlety.)

Instead, Thor does the opposite.

Thor continues to stare in Tony’s direction for a few moments before turning back to Loki and quietly asking, “Do you want to leave?”

Loki licks the rim of the second shot glass, sucks the juice from the lime, and pours the shot down his throat. As the liquor burns down his throat and his eyes squeeze shut and his lips pucker and he argues with his stomach about whether that was one shot too many, Loki violently nods his head.

Quill looks in the problematic direction and everyone is silent for several beats. When the silence has just started to almost become overbearing Quill says, “Ah. Well. Bar’s closing soon anyways and there’s a bottle in my car,” as he gets up to pay the tab and leave.

Loki visibly relaxes and lets out a sigh of relief as he gets up from the table and begins to make his way out to Peter’s car with Thor. Even before they’re out the door Loki’s shaking fingers are fumbling around in his jacket pockets to find his pack of cigarettes. He opens his pack to find that he is, unfortunately, down to his last cigarette. Thankfully Peter wants to stop by a convenience store to pick up chasers. As they leave Thor quietly offers to go inside to get Loki’s cigarettes for him knowing full well that one of Loki’s anxiety possums is about to crush the others skull. They find a 24 hour grocery store and as they are parking Loki hands Thor his wallet because he’s too drunk to decipher what card is which, and Thor finds his debit card for him. Peter comes back with orange juice and pineapple juice, and Thor comes back with two packs of Marlboro 27’s.

The trio makes their way to Loki’s apartment and Loki has to lay down in the backseat of Quill’s SUV while frantically trying to make the tracers and the black of the backs of his eyelids stop spinning _so_ _rapidly_. He doesn’t even know why he’s feeling like this. He and Tony left things on as good of terms as Loki ever thought the two of them could. So why are the anxiety possums still fighting it out in his stomach? Maybe it’s the alcohol or maybe it’s the fact that Loki has been sober for only four hundred and eighty hours or maybe it’s the personality disorder – who knows – but Loki is _shook_.

It’s also the first time he’s craved pills since he finished the week of suboxone.

Loki makes the superb decision to stop drinking once they enter his apartment building and get on the elevator and then everything starts to spin and move again once the elevator starts up. Loki pulls up YouTube on his TV and starts streaming a playlist through the TV. Thor and Quill drink their gin and juice, and Loki, well he’s wondering what he did to deserve some deity’s vengeance and wrath like this.

_It’s just Tony_, he thinks. _You_ know _Tony. It’s okay_.

Still. The anxiety possums have their victor and it’s rock bottom depression and it’s here for a long and splendorous reign.

Loki is laid out on the couch with his long legs across Thor’s lap. Quill is in the loveseat, and Loki can hear Ares purring from atop the couch. Things are chill._ There is no reason for this. You’re home. You’re safe._ There is nothing that should be anxiety inducing happening, but still Loki sits with the feeling and he sits there, and he _feels_. He feels things for the very first time in _years_.

And it makes him want to get high.

. ———

Loki waits for Thor to pass out before he slinks off to his bedroom, leaving Quill with a bottle of half drank gin in one hand and a can of pineapple juice in the other, chin to his chest wearing Loki’s sunglasses and staring at the music video that’s playing on the TV from above the sunglasses. When Loki gets to his bedroom he flips on the overhead light and as quietly as he can closes and locks the door, and somewhere in the distance he hears his phone ping but Loki is worried about much more important things than phone pings. Loki stares at his closet, and he knows what he’s doing here. He doesn’t deny that whatsoever. And he knows that it’s wrong and it’s stupid and it’s _fucked up_.

But he does it anyways.

Loki opens the closet doors and begins rummaging around inside until he finds a very small, and very hollow, Pokeball replica. His heart starts to beat hard in his chest and the anxiety possum is hissing the loudest it can. Loki twists the ball open softly and quietly so as not to spill anything in the mess of clothing that is now on the floor.

Inside are three little white triangular pills.

Loki feels something. He’s not sure what, but it’s _something_.

_Joy_, maybe?

Loki empties his pockets onto the queen sized bed, tossing his wallet and packs of cigarettes there. He grabs his wallet and fishes out two bills. He takes one of the bills and folds it in half and then he folds it again so that the bill is folded into a rectangle. He drops one of the pills into the folded five dollar bill, puts it to his mouth, and begins to crush the pill between the folds of the bill with his teeth.

He makes sure that the entire pill is crushed into a fine powder and then sets it aside; he grabs the second bill and rolls it into a makeshift straw. Loki holds the straw between the index finger and thumb of his right hand, while his left hand holds the other bill level with his eyes. And he knows that it’s wrong and it’s stupid and it’s _fucked up_.

But he does it anyways.

It turns out Loki’s rock bottom has a trap door.

×××

Tony finds himself in a funky amphibian themed bar called the Salty Iguana at 1:37am. He’s celebrating – he’s just completed his first go at creating artificial intelligence – and it _worked_. He’s been awake for almost twenty four hours fixing and tweaking the programming of the AI into perfection and it’s finally, _finally, after an entire **year** of work_, finished. He’s drunk and hot and he can feel his hair matted against the nape of his neck from sweat. It is almost summer now, after all.

Tony is trashed. Like, legitimately _trashed_. He can barely see and now his words are slurring when he talks but he also doesn’t care about the slurred words or missed connections. He cares about _celebrating. _And he’s enchanted by some sulking, blurry figure with dark hair in the far corner of the bar.

Someone kisses his cheek and he doesn’t know who it is, but he kisses back, high on fumes and alcohol and cigarettes. And he stares into the corner and can’t help but feel like the sulking figure in the corner looks familiar. He’s seen those sunglasses before, that messy black hair, and he’s not sure who it is, but he know he wants to go over and talk to them.

_Loki_, he thinks. And then he shakes the thought away until he sees the hulking blond look over towards him and he sees Thor, _Thor_, who he hasn’t seen in months, and he feels his breath collapse in his lungs, because _Loki_. That black mess of blurriness is Loki.

He sees Thor get up to leave, followed by Loki and the man he’s quickly realized is Peter Quill – the owner of the-even-shittier-than-this-one dive bar he used to go to with the two brothers, and he can’t help but feel like he’s missed a second chance.

Tony watches the trio leave the bar, and he’s torn. Continue celebrating with his friends and colleagues, or text his ex? _Decisions, decisions_.

The bar closes soon after that thought flies from his mind, and suddenly Pepper is pulling him away and towards a car, and he’s lying in the backseat vomiting into a clear plastic Walgreens bag talking what Pepper thinks has to be gibberish because she’s never heard of this _Loki_ or this _Thor_ or this _Fucking Peter Quill_**™. **

She gets Tony home and into bed and she falls asleep rather quickly – but Tony doesn’t. He pretends to be asleep, passed out, until Pepper’s breathing has slowed and is even and smooth. And then he pulls out his phone and starts reading through his last few conversations with Loki. He doesn’t want to be that guy, but he sends what is, at its core, a “You up?” text to Loki.

Loki doesn’t answer until almost two days later, and Tony feels the need to hide in his bedroom away from Pepper after he gets the text.

III.

“darlin’, can’t you see  
i’m a broken man  
with addictive tendencies  
and i think i love you  
but i don’t ever think i can  
ever learn how to love just right.”  
⃫ matt maeson – tribulation

Loki says he’s just tired.

Tony smirks and asks, “Just tired?”

Loki nods without looking up from the concrete walkway in front of the park bench he’s sitting on. It’s been two days since Loki has had a pill, and he might be on just a little bit of cocaine and Xanax to help with the come downs, but he’s here. He got the message from Tony the next morning, but it caught him so off guard that it took Loki a day to respond. Quite frankly, he just didn’t know how to or what to say. But he did, and even if it’s just a baby step he took it.

It’s dusk and overcast and Tony can feel soft droplets of rain in his hair and on his shoulders and hands. There’s children playing on the playground several yards away, and their parents and nannies and babysitters are beginning to call to them to come back as the rain picks up, and Tony can’t help but watch them and wonder distantly of a life that maybe could have been for a few moments before he is brought back to reality rather quickly by the hiss that seethes from Loki.

“You okay?” Tony asks, glancing down at Loki from where he stands next to the bench Loki is sitting on.

“Yeah, I just…” he trails off for a moment, looking down at his hands, one of which is holding a cigarette butt while the other is curled in towards his stomach. “I forgot I lit the cigarette.” Loki tosses the cigarette butt into the ashtray part of the trash bin a few feet from him, and then he lights another.

Loki doesn’t look in a good way – there’s dark circles under his eyes, his hair is messy, his finger nails bitten to the quick (worse than Tony has ever seen, which ironically, is actually better than Loki’s looked just in general for months). He’s wearing a long black duster cardigan over a dark blue shirt, black jeans, and his favorite pair of boots. The boots are the only items of clothing Tony recognizes.

Loki hunches forwards so that his elbows are on his knees, his face in his hands. He rubs his hands over his face, pulling the skin down and almost dragging his eyes from their sockets. He digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. The movement seems thoughtless and full of frustration at first, and while the latter may be true, Loki is still nervous from the recent burn to his hand and he’s careful not to let the ash of his newly lit cigarette brush against his hair or any skin.

“Are you high?” Tony asks. The thought crosses his mind and the words are out of his mouth before he can think twice about it. He can’t help but ask, although he feels he already knows the answer to his question.

Loki just throws a side-eyed glare at him and doesn’t answer. And Tony doesn’t hold it against him. It’s not his right to know anymore.

Several beats pass, and finally Tony asks the question that’s been on his mind for the last few days now, “Are you okay?” Tony can’t quite figure out what to do with his hands, so he holds his hand out to Loki, motioning for him to pass the cigarette over so he can have a drag.

So Loki passes the cigarette and purposefully neglects to answer the question that was posed. Tony nudges his shoulder a bit and he feels his stomach drop in sadness a little when Loki instinctively pulls away from his touch.

After another moment, Loki finally answers. “Not really.” The rain is falling more heavily now, and Loki’s hair is starting to cling around his face. There’s lightning in the distance, and a loud clap of thunder. Another moment passes before Loki looks Tony in the eyes.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, man.” _Here, with me, or just in general?_ Tony thinks. The coke has Loki’s heart racing, but the Xanax is making him feel melancholic and nostalgic, and he longs for something just a little bit… _more_.

Because the reason – the _real_ reason – that Tony and Loki don’t work long term is this: if it came down to it Tony would feed Loki drugs from a silver plate if he thought it would help Loki get away.

And Tony can’t bear to watch Loki continue to self-destruct like this anymore.

The rain is getting even heavier now, and Tony knows it’s almost time to go home. He didn’t know it was supposed to rain today, and he honestly regrets picking a place outdoors to meet up. As much as Loki hurts him, Tony _misses_ him. He misses everything that _is_ Loki, the Loki that he feels that only he knows. _Truly_ knows. But that’s a bit of a selfish and conceited thought though, isn’t it? Because there are a small handful that know of Loki as he is now, and Tony knows he’s straight up stupid to think otherwise.

Loki looks up at him, and there are droplets of rain clinging to his eyelashes and forehead. “Would you… would you want to grab a drink?” Loki asks. Tony’s heart fills with a glee that he immediately regrets and chastises himself for feeling.

He knows he shouldn’t.

But he does it anyways.

Maybe – just _maybe_ – that second chance wasn’t a missed one after all.


End file.
